John 4:39-42
My text, which I’ll read in a moment, comes at the conclusion of a remarkable story. It’s a story often discussed as a model for personal evangelism, which it is, and a reminder of the satisfying “water of life” Jesus gives. I want to look at the story from another angle.
Let me remind you of the details. Jesus and the Twelve were traveling through Samaria, a place most Jews tried to avoid. As midday approached it was time for lunch so Jesus announced he would rest by a well just outside a village and wait until his men went into town for some food. As he waited a woman approached the well to get some water.
This was odd since this task was usually taken care of at the beginning of the day when it wasn’t so hot. Then, too, the woman was alone, not walking with women friends who were also going to get water. We very soon learn the reason why: This woman has a “reputation.” She had lived a morally questionable lifestyle. She was alone because the other women in the village would have despised and abhorred her. Her very presence in the village was a scandal.
Jesus knew this perhaps by divine revelation or perhaps by intuition since John presents Jesus as someone who could size up a person pretty quickly.
In any case, Jesus shocks the woman by asking her for a drink of water. It was shocking first of all because she was a Samaritan and Jews didn’t care much for Samaritans. Of course, Samaritans didn’t care much for Jews either but the point is Jesus had broken a racial taboo. Then, too, most Middle Eastern men didn’t talk to women in public—not even their wives. Jesus had broken a social taboo.
But it gets even stranger, shocking. For within a few minutes Jesus not only confronts this woman with the moral chaos of her life, he engages her in a theological discussion. The 1983 film Yentl tells of a woman who disguised herself as a man so she could study the Torah. The story was fiction but the tradition of barring women from studying the Torah wasn’t. In the first century, no rabbi would discuss theology with a woman. He’d consider it a waste of time. Yet, here was Jesus talking to this woman about the Messiah, the nature of worship, and God’s plans for the future. He must have seen a spiritual hunger in her that no one looking only at the mess of her life would have imagined. Then came the great shock.
He tells her that he is the One who would come, the Messiah. So, it is to this foreigner, this outcast, this adulteress, this woman he reveals his identity. And she becomes the first non-Jewish missionary as she goes to tell her village the story of the man at the well.
Near the turn of the twentieth-century, Dutch theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper described this woman as “superficial” and “positively uncouth.” Well, she wasn’t going to become a professor of Reformed Dogmatics but she possessed an essential element to be a witness: She had encountered Jesus and been changed. Perhaps something of that showed in a new manner.
Simple as her faith may have been, she persuaded the village folk—who would have been naturally skeptical of anything she said—to go see Jesus.
Here’s where my text begins:
39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” [1]
We don’t know what happened during those two days among these Samaritans. We can imagine the Twelve whispering among themselves, “Can you believe this? We’re staying with Samaritans, eating at their tables.” John—who was there—tells us that “many…believed because of Jesus’ word.” We don’t know what Jesus may have said to them, but we can be fairly sure it wasn’t the usual scorn and condemnation most Jewish teachers would have heaped on them. Whatever Jesus said, the Samaritans came to a remarkable conclusion: Jesus was “the Savior of the world.”
Although Jesus’ ministry was primarily among the Jews there were occasional hints that he had a broader vision. Jesus understood that his work would not be limited to just one group of people. He would fulfill John the Baptist’s description of him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”
We might look at the earthly ministry of Jesus as “World Evangelization, Phase One.” Eckhard Schnabel has written a massive study of the early Christian outreach (volume one alone has more than 900 pages). Listen to his description of the efforts of Jesus in bringing the good news.
The early Christian missionary work began in Galilee with Jesus' preaching and healing ministry. During his three years of public ministry Jesus could easily have visited the 175 towns and villages on his travels through Lower and Upper Galilee. It would have been difficult to find anyone among the approximately two hundred thousand people living in Galilee who had not heard about Jesus, and presumably there would not have been many people who had not personally encountered him during these three years. Most of the half a million Judeans would only have heard about Jesus, including many of the one hundred thousand inhabitants of Jerusalem. Jesus proclaimed the dawn of God's kingdom in synagogues, in private homes and in the open air, before pious audiences, and before "sinners" such as the tax collectors and their politically problematic and ethically unreliable friends. He had learned disputes with scribes, experts of the law, but he also had conversations with uneducated rural folk. He had contacts with members of the small upper class, even though he avoided the Galilean capitals of Sepphoris and Tiberias. But he concentrated his efforts on the unprivileged, the peasants and the fishermen, rural wage laborers and tenant farmers, day laborers and serfs, artisans and traders, beggars and prostitutes. Jesus sought encounters with men and with women, and he did not refuse to deal with children. He spoke before large crowds of people numbering in the thousands, and he had private conversations with individuals who came with questions or with whom he initiated contact.[2]
That description concerns his ministry before his death and resurrection. Following those events, as he prepared his disciples for the days to come he let them know that phase two was about to begin. Phase two would embrace Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and “everywhere in the world.”[3]
The first disciples would take this task seriously because they, like the Samaritan villagers, had come to believe Jesus was “the Savior of the world.”
What are we saying when we say Jesus is the Savior of the World?
To say Jesus is the Savior of the world is to say something about God. The God of the Bible is not a tribal god, a god limited to one people. God cares for the whole world. That’s explicit in some of the best known words in the Bible. Some of you learned them in Sunday School. Remember, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
The ABBA song “The Winner Takes It All” depicts our lives being controlled by the dice-throw of the gods with “hearts as cold as ice.” The song wasn’t meant to be theology but many do picture God as fundamentally indifferent to our situation. The notion of God being remote and indifferent to the world cannot stand in the face of the mission of the Incarnate One.
He came and moved among us. He sat in the hot noonday sun talking to a “loose” woman about her soul. He tossed his reputation to the wind by staying with pariahs because he cared about them.
The Bible seems to suggest we shouldn’t trust any “savior of the world” who doesn’t have the dirt of the world under his fingernails.
To say Jesus is the Savior of the world is to say something about the church. The Risen Jesus sent his church into the world to carry on his work. That sense of mission has marked the church at its best. The church has sometimes forgotten its task but God has been faithful to remind it that the work isn’t finished.
Awakenings and revivals in the history of the church have tended to jar the church out of this amnesia, giving it a renewed interest in reaching the larger world with the message of Christ. In fact, I’d say that any “revival” that leaves a church turned inward, totally self-centered wasn’t a revival at all.
True revivals lead to a desire to take Christ to those who may have never heard of him. Just look at the awakenings in America alone.
--The Great Awakening in the mid-eighteenth century led to a new effort to reach out to Native Americans and slaves.
--The Second Great Awakening at the beginning of the nineteenth century gave birth to the American involvement in foreign missions. Adoniram Judson sensed the call to missionary work during this revival.
--The Prayer Meeting Revival of 1858/59 produced evangelists like D. L. Moody. It was also during this revival in 1859 that Charlotte Diggs Moon, daughter of an aristocratic family in South Carolina, was converted and first sensed God’s call to missions. We know her better as “Lottie.”
--The many-faceted revival of 1906 also produced a new interest in missions and evangelism. No denomination was untouched and some were created by the revival. These new denominations were passionately committed to the missionary cause.
Followers of this “Savior of the World” have an inherent interest in telling the world of this Savior.
Of course they made mistakes. Sometimes they depended too much on the power of the government to extend the gospel. More often, they confused their cultural baggage with gospel essentials. But when their love for the Savior and for those the Savior loved came through, they made progress despite their failings. Evangelist Luis Palau tells this story about how his family came to Christ though the efforts of missionaries in his native Argentina.
The British missionaries who led my family to Christ made all the cultural mistakes in the book. I remember as a little boy sitting in the front row, watching this poor man. It was hot as blazes in the summer. Being a proper Britisher, he not only wore a tweed suit but a vest and thick socks. He would stand there sweating and sweating. I remember looking at the poor fellow and saying, “Why doesn’t he take his coat off?” But a proper Britisher in those days kept his coat on and toughed it out. He massacred the Spanish language and had strange foreign habits. But because of that fellow, my father went to heaven.
Missionaries are more sensitive—and perhaps cooler—now but the desire to honor the charge given by the Savior of the world continues to motivate them.
Of course, to say Jesus is the Savior of the world is to invite controversy. Seems like you can’t make any statement about Jesus without someone getting irritated. Saying Jesus is the Savior of the world is no different. That shouldn’t surprise us because Jesus told his earliest followers that preaching about him would inspire strong emotions—some of them negative.
àThere are those who ask, why does the world needs a savior anyway?
Have you seen the bumper sticker that says, “Born Ok the First Time?” It’s a challenge to the Christian call to be born again.
As we look over the headlines, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could think this isn’t a broken world. But, of course, the bumper sticker guy may be saying, “Other people might be messed up but not me.”
Interestingly, John tells us that saying we’re not messed up means we’re really messed up. Glenn Reed once said that it was harder to get a man lost than it is to get him saved. That was years ago but the situation has hardly changed. We still don’t like to admit our spiritual need.
Once you could talk to someone raised in the West and repeat Paul’s declaration, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” No more. We have conveniently dismissed the Bible as an authority in our lives. Just quoting Scripture may not shake anyone.
Instead we have to rely on the power of God’s Spirit to shake the confidence of the most jaded crowd. That’s what happened on the Day of Pentecost when Peter preached about the crucified and risen Christ. The crowd cried out, “What shall we do?” Once that happened, Peter could say, “Repent….”
A. W. Tozer gives a clue about what happened. He says,
Sin has many manifestations but its essence is one. A moral being, created to worship before the throne of God, sits on the throne of his own selfhood and from that elevated position declares, “I AM.” That is sin in its concentrated essence; yet because it is natural it appears to be good. “What shall we do?” (Acts 2:37) is the deep heart cry of every man who suddenly realizes that he is a usurper and sits on a stolen throne.
On our mission for the Savior of the world we need the Spirit’s power. That’s why Jesus told the disciples to wait before they set out on the task he had given them until they were “clothed with power from heaven.”
And keep in mind that skeptics can and do come to faith. It happens in remarkable ways. That’s why the story of C. S. Lewis’s conversion is so appealing. This man, who was one of the twentieth century’s most influential Christian writers, was once an atheist who had no use for God. But God had use for him. Here’s his story:
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen [College at Oxford], night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. . .
àThen, there are those who ask, “With so many religions in the world how can you claim Jesus is the Savior of the world?”
Christianity has an estimated two billion adherents in the world, with varying degrees of commitment to the faith. But that’s only a percentage of the world’s population. There are a dozen or so major religions and thousands of lesser-known religions. When we tell folks in these religions that Jesus is the Savior of the world, they’re likely to say, “We have our own Savior, thank you.” Although some might say, “Another Savior, great, we need all we can get.”
Those who are religious but non-Christian have one attitude toward Christianity’s claim that Jesus is the Savior of the world. The non-religious have another. We seem to be moving from an attitude that says all religions are equally true and lead to God to one that says all religions are false, even dangerous, since there probably is no God. The one attitude is naïve, the other is just cynical. Worldwide those who take either position are in the minority. We’re more likely to encounter someone who holds some religious worldview.
When we watch the early church encountering those who were part of another religion, we’re surprised had how respectful they could be. Respectful, yet forthright.
They focused on building up Christ. Shortly after the attacks of 9/11 a prominent Baptist leader preached a sermon saying that Mohammed was guilty of an act of gross immorality. It created a firestorm. The charge may have been true, though several historians questioned it, but it certainly didn’t win any Muslims to Christianity.
We would do better focusing on Christ, laying out his claims, portraying his beauty. When we do that he will outshine any other religious leader or prophet. A Hindu guru once gave this advice to a Christian evangelist, “Don’t ever use the Western style of arguing, trying to show your religion is better than my religion or your Savior is superior. Just simply tell who Jesus is. Tell of his character. Tell what he’s like. Let people do the comparing for themselves.”
If we really believe Jesus is the Savior of the world, then we believe he has an appeal beyond any argument we might put forward.
To say Jesus is the Savior of the world is to say there is hope. The story of Jesus—his incarnation, his death, and resurrection—tells us that God cares for us. We aren’t abandoned to this world. There is hope for salvation.
Maybe that’s what the Samaritans found so appealing. Seen as half-breeds, the Romans didn’t care for them and neither did the Jews. But this remarkable man from Galilee seemed to care. And they soon realized his love was big enough to embrace the whole world.
That’s hope for the world, but there’s also hope for us who are set to tell the world about this Savior. Our hope consists in this: Our success does not depend upon our skill, our knowledge, our powers of persuasion. That’s why Kuyper missed the point about the woman at the well. She reminds us that our success doesn’t depend on what we know but Who we know.
If we believe him to be the Savior of the world, we’ll know he should be the center of the message we take to the world.
[1] The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989 (Jn 4:39–42). Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
[2] Eckhard Schnabel. Early Christian Mission, Volume 1: Jesus and the Twelve, Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004, p. 383.
[3] “Then you will tell everyone about me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and everywhere in the world.” Acts 1:8 CEV.
